EU Lobby Bot

The rising level of euroscepticism among young people in the EU needs to be addressed by better communication between the EU and its citizens. The YouLobby Bot is an algorithm which helps citizens who have questions or proposals to Members of the EU Parliament to identify MEPs who are working on the issue of their interest. Apart from identifying the most suitable MEPs it searches for their contacts at different platforms and suggests them to users.

Example: Kasia from Poland has a question to EU representative regarding the future of Schengen area. Furthermore, she has an idea of how to strengthen the idea of free movement of people in the EU. She turns to the YouLobby Bot, enters key words such as ‘migration’, ‘Schengen zone’ and the bot suggests to Anna those MEPs who have recently made opinions, suggested legislative changes or made speeches regarding this topic. YouLobby Bot also suggests the official email, the public profiles of those MEPs on Linkedin, Facebook and other platforms that Anna can send her question or proposal to them.

The main objective: To fight euroscepticism among young people in the EU by establishing easy and efficient communication between the EU and young people.

Whom is the project aimed at? At young people 18-30 years old from Europe with a specific focus on vulnerable and less involved into politics groups (women, minorities, people with disabilities)

How is this project creative and innovative? YouLobby is the first project of its kind in the EU which uses the latest developments in tech to boost the political engagement of young people in the EU decision making processes.

Which actions will be implemented?

The creation of the YouLobby software. First pilot will be tested in April 2019 and the official version will go live on June 2019 when the new EU Parliament is elected.

Two workshops on the use of new technologies for political engagement and activism will be held in Lisbon, Portugal in July 2019 and in Nantes, France in August 2019. During the workshops the YouLobby Bot will be presented. The workshops will be organized in the form of panel discussions where the speakers would be representatives of public sector, NGOs and young politicians and the audience – young people. Our aim is to invite to the Forums those young people who have never heard about e-democracy and other means of digital politics and never participated in offline campaigning but show interest in political life.

Forums will be supported by active online activities which will take place at the web-sources of our partners: Politicast, European Heroes, Radioshows.